With Inside a Pearl: My Paris Years, Edmund White has added another lovely illumination to his row of votive memories. He opened the door to earlier reminiscences in two previous and very successful memoirs. In the masterful My Lives, he explored the psychological and psychosexual influences of his parents, relatives and first friends on his formative years, and "City Boy" chronicled his years of sexual awakenings, political activism and lovers, also his founding, along with other gay writers, of The Violet Quill and crucial participation in the Gay Liberation Movement, pre- and post-Stonewall.
In this new and happily-greeted memoir, Inside a Pearl, White travels back in mind and heart to Paris and the French countryside. Physically and psychically exhausted by the losses and decimation of the burgeoning AIDS crisis in America, he decided to see if a foreign place could help revive him and his creative fountain. He headed for Paris, a city he had always dreamed of living in. Middle-aged, he arrived among the French, not able to speak their rapid-fire language, an alien to that city's culture.
He wondered why he chose to make such a bold relocation in his early 40s and soon discovered that the city, its traditions and its people sparked his curiosity and his creativity, for these became years rich with writing, research and love. It was in Paris that White began what was to be the ultimate go-to biography of Jean Genet, also worthy profiles of Proust and Rimbaud, this working sojourn bookended by a chance ( or not-so-chance ) meeting with architect Hubert Sorin, who was to become White's lover for many sustaining years ahead, and by Michael Carroll, a young man on leave from his Peace Corps stints in Yemen and Czechoslovakia whom White met just as he was about to run away from Paris, so devastated and lonely was he following Sorin's prolonged and painful death from AIDS.
White tells us he moved to Paris, in part, to escape what had evolved into a static and stagnant existence in New York. There is nothing static about Inside a Pearl; it is a locomotive in high gear from page one, alive and shining with stories of the many literati and glitterati of the 1980s City of Light—Yves St. Laurent, Catherine Deneuve, Alan Hollinghurst, Michel Foucault, many more. White met or knew everybody who was anybody and they delighted in knowing him—the gossip is operatic, and these pages are full to bursting with the author's signature wit and a comedic bent hard to beat, as well as his keen and observant eye, an uncanny magic and a habit for displaying a refreshing candor as he scrutinizes people, places and events, laying his literary paintbrush down on yet another of his brilliant, nonesuch canvases. The slimness of the volume belies its importance; it spills over with wonders books double and triple its size don't have—vivid descriptions of people and neighborhoods, of the avenues and arrondissements of one of his favorite cities, quite possibly his favorite of all. And there are sentences here blanketed in such a tenderness, if they don't bring a tear to your eye, you should lie down because, reader, you are probably dead.
Inside a Pearl offers, most of all, White's loving and objective valentine to his good friend, Marie-Claude de Brunhoff ( "MC" ). MC joins the ranks of strong-willed, quixotic, intelligent women who led the way into yet another mid-century movement: women's lib. White makes us like and admire her—not in spite of her tics and quirks but because of them—and she strides amid these pages still vibrant, expansive, accommodating and alive, as if she and her kind have never died, will never die…
This is a work of sure-handed and reassuring prose, and it fits beautifully into the collage of memories White is reconstructing for his legions of readers. White has always had his pen trained on the zeitgeist, and the timing for Inside a Pearl couldn't coincide any better as it does with a worldwide resurgence of interest in the 1980s.
He wouldn't like it put this way but Edmund White—a true social, sexual and cultural pioneer—led us out of the dark when the closet was very dark, indeed. He marched us out into the light of liberation to a place of not only self-acceptance but of real and a lasting pride in who we are. In Inside a Pearl, he takes us on a journey back to a time in gay history when the happy results of his literary liberation placed gays on center stage.
In the vast tangle that LGBTQ literature has become, White's work is the gold beginning and ending thread you want to look for. Like Christmas tree lights balled up in last year's box, if you find the line of White's work, it will surely lead you to the spark that lit up the whole tree.
Do add Inside a Pearl to your must-read list. It is a beautiful, strong swan of a book, navigating a winter lake, remembering summer…
